How do you even begin to break down Martin Scorsese's staggeringly consistent filmography, let alone try to rank his movies in order of quality? One of the most talented directors in American cinematic history, there's not a whole lot of daylight between his best and worst films.
Even the box office bombs that couldn't connect with an audience have enough redeeming qualities to make them worthwhile. Scorsese's films are never bad, in part because he has such a reverence for cinema; each of his movies is steeped in Hollywood history, with hidden depths and allusions to things that came before. Despite the fact that Scorsese is a living legend in the film industry, he hasn't gotten the accolades that he arguably deserves.
Several of his films have received Academy Awards, but in his long and storied career, he's only won Best Director once. You wonder if this is because his work continually defies expectations. He's best known for gangster films, but he's also never passed up the opportunity to challenge himself with a totally different genre whenever he found a story he was passionate about.
There had to be one at the bottom, and "Boxcar Bertha" seems like an obvious choice. After garnering attention for his short films and independent directorial debut a few years earlier, "Boxcar Bertha" would serve as Martin Scorsese's first Hollywood feature. Scorsese tackles the loosely autobiographical story of a female outlaw played by Barbara Hershey, who is on the run with union organizer "Big" Bill Shelly David Carradine after a series of train robberies.
There's nothing particularly wrong with "Boxcar Bertha," but it's clear that Scorsese isn't in his element quite yet. Although his exploration of American criminality tackles themes that would be essential to his later work, he leans a bit too heavily on other crime films for inspiration. And released just a few short years after "Bonnie and Clyde," it suffers by comparison. If you had to list all of Martin Scorsese's films, "Bringing Out the Dead" is the one that everyone except the diehard fans would have trouble remembering.
